We’ve realized we have not made a new site update post since July 4th so we thought we should write a new one. We’ve been so busy working on things we neglected to do so.
- Our HEMA Club Finder now has 316 schools in it. We know there are more entries to add and have made these additions when requested but we temporarily stopped our own archiving of clubs. We’ve spent most of August working to correct several things on the website that broke when the latest version of WordPress was released last month. Our club finder was one of these broken features, and there are still some things being worked on.
- You may have noticed a section of the website sidebar that suggests HEMA clubs near your area. Depending on your browser permission settings the HEMA Resources site may now ask you to share your location data when you visit it, and this is the reason why it is doing so. This data is not actually shared with us, but rather to Google via their API. As with all websites we know people’s location data by IP addresses when they visit the site but we don’t actually see the data on your searches for local clubs by your individual IP addresses (although we do have separate tracking to see which club websites are most commonly clicked on from the club finder app, and this helps us evaluate how effective we are at helping clubs grow as well as the effectiveness of the applet itself).
- You can now support the HEMA Resources website by purchasing one of our branded t-shirts via Redbubble. These products are also advertised in our sidebar now. We’ve noticed some people have made purchases already; we very much appreciate you for doing so.
- Numerous HEMA related articles and guides have been published to the HEMA Resources website.
- Is HEMA a sport? Historical European martial arts and tournaments.
- How Dangerous is a Medieval Sword?
- Who is the Best Sword Fighter in Game of Thrones? A HEMA Perspective
- How to Find Medieval Sword Fighting Classes Near You
- How to Learn HEMA when there is no Local Club Near You
- The Johannes Liechtenauer tradition and the German School of Fencing
- Great HEMA T-Shirts for Historical European Martial Arts Fencers
- The Best Albion Swords for Sale to Use in HEMA
- How to Learn Sword Fighting from Historical Sources
- Great Western Martial Arts and Historical European Martial Arts Books
- Recommended Starter Gear for Historical Rapier Fencing
- Historical Medieval Battle (HMB) Vs Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA)
- How to Create an Amazing Website for Your HEMA Club Cheaply and Quickly
- An Open Letter to HEMA Club Owners
- Great historical movies and shows: how to learn general information about European history by watching TV
- What type of fencing sword is used in Historical European Martial Arts?
- What is HEMA? European Sword Martial Arts Explained
- What Martial Art did Knights use?
- Choosing Tournament Gear for Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) Fencing
- What is a Swordsman?
- Best Federschwert Practice Long Swords to Buy for HEMA
- How to Break In Brand New HEMA Gear
- We also published some reviews of books about HEMA,
- Book Review for Fiore de Liberi’s Armizare: The Chivalric Martial Arts System of Il Fior di Battaglia by Robert Charrette
- HEMA Book Review: Fighting with the German Longsword by Christian Tobler
- Book Review: The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts by Guy Windsor
- Recommended Historical Swordsmanship Treatises
In total there are 27 new articles on the site that have been added since July 4th, 2020.
Other updates:
- Multiple small tweaks and improvements to articles that we made when fixing errors created by the new version of WordPress.
- Many new items have also been added to the ‘Shop’ section; not all of these have articles related to them yet and we haven’t really been keeping track of all the new product links to affiliates.
- Removal of some duplicate club entries from the club finder.
We mentioned this on a Facebook page post but the site has been the subject of harassment from a small number of people in the community. This has been touched on in our Open Letter to HEMA Club Owners.
This is part of a report from our primary firewall provider from only the past week,
While lies and misinformation about who the site authors may be are one matter, the efforts of a few individuals to launch DDOS attacks and find security holes in the site is another matter. Every day the website firewalls are fending off attempts to bypass the security and this is unusual for a fairly new website that is not in any kind of competitive market, nor is a site that deals in any kind of financial transactions internally. The WooCommerce shopping cart is not used (we disabled it) and we only monetize via affiliate links, display advertisements and now the Redbubble store for our branded merchandise.
There is no possible financial gain for the usual kind of hacker in putting this effort into trying to infiltrate our website so we can only assume it is being done in the hopes of finding identifiable information on the website authors. Yet all this behavior does is re-affirm the reasons why we chose to publish this website anonymously in the first place.
Nevertheless we will endure. We have published 70 articles so far and we will continue to release new articles. Our goal is to become an information portal for the HEMA community to assist newcomers and the general public with locating information on how to learn about HEMA, as well as find schools where they can do so. The website has accumulated 57,554 page views since we launched and our Facebook has gained 1,000 page followers as of today. This website is succeeding in its purpose.
If you want to support the site and contribute to the funding of its operation and improvements, please buy a shirt. It isn’t required but it helps us cover the expenses of running the site, especially now that it needs the level of security of an actual ecommerce site. We also hope others will reshare our posts to their friends and link back to our website as a source of quality information about HEMA, assisting others with discovering it. Thank you all for your support so far.
-HEMAR Team
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If you’d like to learn more information about historical fencing practices please check out our Learn HEMA page for a guide to learning about the historical weapon that interests you. You can also find more guides we’ve written about other topics at our Helpful Guides page. Feel free to share your thoughts on this article by commenting or at our forums.
